The William
Smith Stone Column
The William Smith Stone Column near
Wellow
Photo credit Andrew Mathieson
In 2006 the transport charity
Sustrans commissioned the sculptor Jerry Ortmans to design and construct an art
installation to celebrate the work of William Smith, the “Father of English
Geology”. This Stone Column was to be in natural stone and to be installed near
the village of Wellow, a few miles south of Bath, and along Route 24 of the
National Cycle Network. The section of the Route from Bath to Frome has been
called the Colliers Way and it provides new access to both the disused Somerset
and Dorset railway line and the original route of the southern branch of the
Somersetshire Coal Canal, which Smith worked on between 1793 and 1799.
The siting
was intended to link Smith's understanding of the local geology with his work
on the survey and construction of the canal, which gave him so much evidence
for his ground breaking understanding of stratigraphy and the use of fossils to
identify beds of rock. In fact, although most of this southern branch of the
canal was excavated, the company ran out of funds to build a flight of locks
and it was never connected to the rest of the canal by water. Instead coal was
carried along the original towpath on a horse-drawn railway and transferred to
boats on the main canal near Midford.
The design of the sculpture was based on
Smith's account of the sequence of local rocks which he drew up in his famous
Table of Strata in 1799, shortly after his dismissal from the Coal Canal Company.
Seven large blocks of local rock were chosen and these were arranged into a
vertical structure in their order of succession. Ortmans worked with local
geologist Simon Carpenter to select suitable stone from a number of working
quarries in the West of England, and they range from Carboniferous Pennant
Sandstone up to Cretaceous Chalk.
Sustrans also commissioned two
information panels to be installed along the Colliers Way to help visitors
better understand Smith's work in terms of the local geology and his work on
the construction of the Coal Canal. One was placed beside the Stone Column and
it concentrates on the local geology and Smith's work and the history of the
Canal. It features a little-seen engraving of Smith in 1807, when he was aged
38, and emphasizes that the canal was one of the most prosperous in the south
of England. Unfortunately there is little evidence of the canal nearby since
its route was mostly destroyed by the construction of the railway.
The second information panel is just south
of the Midford railway viaduct, and this mainly deals with the various forms of
transport which once existed nearby. There is a photograph of a train on both
the Somerset and Dorset and the Limpley Stoke – Camerton lines in 1958, when
the latter railway was being scrapped. The illustration for the Coal Canal is a
photograph of Midford Weigh House which was taken in about 1890. An extract
from a geological map of Smith's is also included. This was published in 1820,
several years after his famous geological map of England and Wales, and Smith
included all the existing canals and railways of the time.
Although these installations are a
distance from the sites most people associate with William Smith (Tucking Mill,
Rugborne House, etc.), they add new ways of commemorating his pioneering
contribution to geology and in addition are set in an area of attractive
Inferior Oolite and Fullers Earth countryside which Smith would have known
well.
Andrew Mathieson
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